I’ve been working with gpt-4 since the week it came out, and I guarantee you that even if it never became any more advanced, it could already put at least 30% of the white collar workforce out of business.
The only reason it hasn’t is because companies have barely started to comprehend what it can do.
Within 5 years the entire world will have been revolutionized by this technology. Jobs will evaporate faster than anyone is talking about.
If you’re very smart, and you begin to use gpt-4 to write the tools that will replace you, then you MIGHT have 10 good years left in this economy before humans are all but obsolete.
If you’re not staying up nights, scared shitless by what’s coming, it’s because you don’t really understand what gpt-4 can do.
You sound like one of those idiots preaching the apocalypse from a street corner. Humans obsolete in 10 years? Yeah sure buddy, right after all those profits trickle down. This is just another tool, an interesting one to be sure, but still just a tool. If you’re staying up nights worrying about this, you don’t really understand the technology, or maybe you’re just worried someone is going to realize you don’t do shit.
I think once sap and jira start implementing a lot more AI and make it simpler to use it could cut down a lot of corporate jobs, not the hands on stuff but a lot of the simpler jobs like purchasing and inventory staff could be shrunken down to a fewer people and fewer cubicles. At least that’s what we talked about at our company how everyone is adjusting to the new world especially advertising now that everything will be served to you by a bot instead of a search
This is part of the problem. They don’t, and won’t, fully understand the technology or its limitations or long-term impacts. They will understand that the salesman pushing the AI product told them it could eliminate 5-10% of their workforce. Whether or not the product can actually do that effectively won’t matter, they’ll still buy it, implement it, and fire a bunch of people.
I work with AI stuff, just getting into LLM, but I have been doing SD work since the public release last year. In just over 1 year the SD capability has gone from being able to draw a passable image of a cat at 512x512 pixels that required a reasonably powerful graphics card to complete to being able to create 4k images on the same cards that are nearly indistinguishable from actual photos/paintings. It is the single fastest adaptation and development of a technology I have seen in my 30 years in tech. I have actually been tracking the job market and the impacts that this will have and he is not all that far off in his estimate. The current push in AI development is nearly a ubiquitous existential threat to employment as we view it in the society of the United States. Everyone is on the chopping block and you’d best believe that the C-level executives want to eliminate as many positions as possible. Labor is viewed as an atrocious expense and the first place that cuts should be made. I challenge you to actually come up with a list of 10 jobs that employ more than 100,000 people in the country that you think would be safe from AI and I will see how many of them I can find information on someone who is already actively working on eliminating them.
Companies don’t want employees, only paying customers. If they can eliminate employees, they will. Hence self-checkouts in grocers, pay at the pump for gas stations, order kiosks at McDonald’s, mobile ordering for virtually every fast food place, the list goes on and on. These are all recent non-AI replacements that have cut into the employment prospects for people.
Pretty sure nah. But time will tell. I will believe it when I see it. AI has been coming for jobs since before terminator. It will replace thousands of jobs just like :
Washer women, lamp lighters, calculators and all the work that farm labourers used to do. Automation comes for us all.
Some jobs shouldn’t exist anyway. God the amount of office workers moving numbers from one tab to another and getting paid a bucket load.
However nursing and elderly care. Psychology counselling mindfulness teachers and jobs that are actually useful for society are probably safe. Yes ai can do some of all these things but it can’t do them all with empathy. Empathy is key to most of these human focused roles. We need more people in these roles and less working to make more money.
“It won’t take people’s jobs! And also people’s jobs are stupid and they deserve to have them taken away!”
What jobs are “useful for society” has no impact on what jobs are actually available to society, only what is deemed “profitable” has any place in this capitalist dystopia. Nice idealism though, I hope it won’t sting too bad having it shattered growing up.
I’m grown up. It will remove jobs. Just said that. Jobs that could be automated regardless. Obviously ai will remove jobs. Just like computers did. But not ones that we actually need. Pretty easy to understand or do you need to grow up to understand that ?
But a lot of jobs did get automated away. And serious consequences did occur from that. Sometimes places rebound from it, but sometimes they did not. And at some point… there will be more people than jobs for them to do, as we continue automating.
In the end, the base foundation for capitalism will be broken, and we will be in an economic crisis of unprecedented scales.
We don’t want to work. We can automate away every job. Then we can be free to actually pursue what we want. Humanity isn’t based on how many shiny trinkets we have.
Yes, but the problem is, we are stuck with the system until we force a societal level change. Capitalism works plenty well enough for the powerful, and they aren’t willing to let go that easily.
I don’t disagree with most of what you said. I think so far the following jobs are safe from direct AI replacement, because it is much harder to replace manual laborers.
Oil rig worker
Plumber
Construction worker
Landscaper/gardener
Telephone repair tech
Mechanic
Firefighter
Surveyor
Wildlife management officer
Police
What companies won’t realize until too late is that paying customers need jobs to pay for things. If AI causes unemployment to rise to some ungodly high, paying customers will become rare and companies will collapse in droves.
Thanks for actually rising to the challenge, it was actually fascinating to do the research to see how AI is affecting the various industries, and how deeply. I will say that I was able to find direct evidence of replacement in 7/10 of them, 1 was work that is similar and could easily be adapted (telecom line repair), one was an analysis that I think has a lot of good points (plumber), and one was genuinely all about augmenting the capabilities of workers already in place (wildlife conservation/officer).
Telephone repair tech netl.doe.gov/sites/default/…/20VPRSC_Zhang.pdf(sorry for the PDF. It is not specifically phone lines, but the tech could be adapted relatively easily to climb a telephone pole instead of a boiler wall)
What companies won’t realize until too late is that paying customers need jobs to pay for things. If AI causes unemployment to rise to some ungodly high, paying customers will become rare and companies will collapse in droves.
I wholeheartedly agree. Functionally, we are going to have to institute a UBI model. It is the only way that society will be able to distribute funds properly when population outpaces jobs due to the exponential growth of populations and the rapidly shrinking landscape of jobs. The corporations are going to need to pay us one way or another.
Damn… nice work on the research! I will read through these as I get time. I genuinely didn’t think there would be much for manual labor stuff. I’m particularly interested in the plumber analysis.
I think augmentation makes a lot of sense for jobs where a human body is needed and it will be interesting to see how/if trade skill requirements change.
I’ll edit this as I read…
Plumbing. The article makes the point that it isn’t all or nothing. That as automation increases productivity, fewer workers are needed. Ok, sure, good point.
Robot plumber? A humanoid robot? Not very likely until enormous breakthroughs are made in machine vision (I can go into more detail…), battery power density, sensor density, etc. The places and situations vary far too greatly.
Rather than an Asimov-style robot, a more feasible yet productivity enhancing solution is automated pipe cutting and other tasks. For example, you go take your phone and measure the pipe as described in the link. Now press a button, walk out to your truck by which time the pipe cutter has already cut off the size you need saving you several minutes. That savings probably means you can do more jobs per day. Cool.
Edit 2
Oil rig worker. Interesting and expected use of AI to improve various aspects of the drilling process. What I had in mind was more like the people that actually do the manual labor.
Autonomous drones, for example, can be used to perform inspections without exposing workers to dangerous situations. In doing so, they can be equipped with sensors that send images and data to operators in real time to enable quick decisions and effective actions for maintenance and repair.
Now that’s pretty cool and will probably reduce demand for those performing inspections (some of whom will have to be at the other end receiving and analyzing data from the robot until such time as AI can do that too.
Autonomous robots, on the other hand, can perform maintenance tasks while making targeted repairs to machinery and equipment.
Again, technologies required to make this happen aren’t there yet. Machine vision (MV) alone is way too far from being general purpose. You can decide a MV system that can, say, detect a coke can and maybe a few other objects under controlled conditions.
But that’s the gotcha.Change the intensity of lighting, change the color temperature or hue of the lighting and the MV probably won’t work. It might also mistake diet coke can or a similar sized cylinder for a Pepsi can. If you want it to recognize any aluminum beverage can that might be tough. Meanwhile any child can easily identify a can in any number of conditions.
Now imagine a diesel engine generator, let’s say. Just getting a robot to change the oil would be nice. But it has to either be limited to a specific model of engine or be able to recognize where the oil drain plug and fill spot is for various engines it might encounter.
What if the engine is a different color? Or dirty instead of clean? Or it’s night, or noon (harsh shadows), overcast (soft shadows), or sunset (everything is yellow orange tinted)? I suppose it could be trained for a specific rig and a specific time of day but that means set up time costs a lot. It might be smarter to build some automated devices on the engine like a valve on the oil pan. And a device to pump new oil in from a vat or standard container or whatever. That would be much easier. Maybe they already do this, idk.
Anyway… progress is being made in MV and we will make far more. That still leaves the question of an autonomous robot of some kind able to remove and reinstall a drain plug. It’s easy for us but you’d be surprised at how hard that would be for a robot.
Your points on MV are not unfounded, but they are also extremely homeocentric. All of your examples rely on the visible light spectrum as well as standard “vision” as we know it. Realistically any sensor can be used to generate an image if you know what you are doing with it. Radio telescopes are a great example of this. There is also a lot of research going on in giving AI’s MV senses access to other sections of the EM spectrum ( edge-ai-vision.com/…/beyond-visible-light-applica… and technologyreview.com/…/machine-vision-has-learned… ) as well as echolocation ( imveurope.com/…/echolocation-neural-net-gives-pho… ). There are many other types of “vision” that can be used that can definitely distinguish a popcan.
Agree that other parts of the EM spectrum could enhance the ability of MV to recognize things. Appreciate the insights – maybe I will be able to use this when I get back to tinkering with MV as a hobbyist.
Of course identifying one object is one level. For a general purpose replacement for humans ability, since that’s what the thread is focused (ahem) on, it has to identify tens of thousands of objects.
I need to rethink my opinion a bit. Not only how far general object recognition is but also how one can “cheat” to enable robotic automation.
Tasks that are more limited in scope and variability would be a lot less demanding. For a silly example, let’s say we want to automate replacing fuses in cars. We limit it to cars with fuse boxes in the engine bay and we can mark the fuse box with a visual tag the robot can detect. The layout of the fuses per vehicle model could be stored. The code on the fuse box identifies the model. The robot then used actuators to remove the cover and orients itself to the box using more markers and the rest is basically pick and place technology. That’s a smaller and easier problem to solve than “fix anything possibly wrong with a car”. A similar deal could be done for oil changes.
For general purpose MV object detection, I would have to go check but my guess is that what is possible with state of the art MV is identifying a dozen or maybe even hundreds of objects so I suppose one could do quite a bit with that to automate some jobs. MV is not to my knowledge at a level of general purpose replacement for humans. Yet. Maybe it won’t take that much longer.
In ~15 years in the hobbyist space we’ve gone from recognizing anything of a specified color under some lighting conditions to identifying several specific objects. And without a ton of processing power either. It’s pretty damn impressive progress, really. We have security cameras that can identify animals, people, and delivery boxes. I am probably selling short what MV will be able to do in 15 more years.
Had a thought that deserved a separate post. Your selection of MV tasks was rather perverse for the tasks we were discussing. Identifying a pop can is definitely something that humans can do easily because pop cans were made for us to be able to easily identify them. Level the playing field and let’s start looking for internal stress fractures in the superstructure of a 100’ tall concrete bridge. That is something that AI drones are already being designed and deployed for. The drone can easily approach the bridge with a suite of sensors that let it see deep into the superstructure and detect future failure points. Humans would struggle to do that. I have also seen things about maintenance drones that are able to crawl on the bridge using a variety of methods (usually they are designed for specific bridges) that are able to fill cracks with sealant and ablate rust using lasers, then paint the freshly cleaned metal. The benefit of replacing a workforce with AI-driven robotics is that you can purpose-build and purpose-train the tool to do exactly what you need it to do. A robot that scurries into a crawl space to run a pipe for a plumber doesn’t need to know how to do anything but recognize where it goes, what not to touch, and how much force to use when installing it. It doesn’t need to identify a pop can, it doesn’t need to draw a Rembrandt. All it needs to do is pull a pipe and weld it in place (and yes, I am oversimplifying a bit, I know that).
The other thing that kinda gets me is the whole “cramped spaces” safety net that I kept seeing for why this job or that was going to be safe. Designing a small, agile robot is not really a challenge. Add onto it that in many situations you could use a tethered drone to do the actual work that is much smaller and the AI brain can be sitting safely outside the situation. You could even plug it into power, so battery tech doesn’t need to increase. shrug I guess I just see quite a bit of very fast advances in the tech that have a worrying trajectory to me.
All great points. I guess I need to think of this topic more from the “what is possible” mindset rather than the “this is too hard” mindset to get a fair assessment of what is coming. All while still framing it in the sense of improving worker efficiency and automating human tasks piecemeal over time.
You sound like one of those peasants standing on street corners saying, “horses replaced with fuming metal boxes in 10 years? Hah, yeah, sure buddy, right after we put a man on the moon! Getoutta here, you loon!”
Do you believe this LLM tech has the ability to make judgement calls, say? Or understand meaning?
What has been your experience with the accuracy / correctness of the answers it has provided? Does it match claims that mistakes or “hallucinations” occur often?
You’re wandering into one of the great questions of our age: what is intelligence? I don’t have a great answer. All I know is that gpt-4 can REASON, and does so better than the average human.
It’s gpt-4 self-aware? Yes. To an extent. It knows what it is, and can use that information in its reasoning. It knows it’s an LLM, but not which model.
Can it make judgement calls? Yes. Better than the average human.
Understand meaning? Absolutely. To a jaw-dropping extent.
Accuracy and correctness… Depends on the type of question.
What you need to understand is that gpt-4 isn’t a whole brain. Think of it as if we have managed to reproduce the language center of the brain. I believe this is mechanism for higher reasoning in the human brain.
But just as in humans with right-brain injuries, the language center is disconnected from reality at times.
So, when you think about gpt-4 as the most important, difficult to solve part of the brain, you start to understand that with some minimal supporting infrastructure, you now have something very similar to a complete brain.
You can use vector databases to give it long-term memory, and any kind of data retrieval used to augment it’s prompts improved accuracy and reduces hallucinations almost entirely.
With my very mediocre programming skills, I managed to build a system that is curious, has a long-term memory, and do a wide variety of tasks, enough to easily replace an entire customer service, tech support team, sales team, and marketing team.
That’s just ME, and working with the gpt-4 that’s available to the public with a bunch of guardrails on it. Today.
Imagine a less-restricted system, with infrastructure built by an experienced enterprise coding team, and with just one more generation of LLM improvement? That could wipe out half the white collar workforce.
If LLM improvement was only geometric, and not even exponential (as it clearly is), in 10 years these things will be smarter AND MORE CREATIVE than all humans.
The truth is that we’re going to be there in 5 years.
Indeed, intelligence is …a difficult thing to define. It’s also a fascinating area to ponder. The reason I asked was to get an idea of where your head is at with the claims you made.
Now, I admit I haven’t done a lot with gpt-4 but your comments make me think it is worth the time to do so.
So you indicate gpt-4 can reason. My understanding is gpt-4 is an LLM, basically a large scale Markov chain, trained to respond with appropriate output based on input (questions).
On the one hand, my initial reaction is: no, it doesn’t reason it just mimics or simulates human reasoning that came before it in text form.
On the other hand, if a program could perfectly simulate whatever processes are involved in reasoning by a human to the point that they’re indistinguishable, is it not, in effect, reasoning? (I suppose this amounts to a sort of Turing Test but for reasoning exercises).
I don’t know how gpt4 LLMs work yet. I imagine, being a Markov Model (specifically a Markov Chain), if the model is trained on human language then the underlying semantics are sort of implicitly captured in the statistical model. Like, simplistically, if many sentences reflect human knowledge that cars are vehicles and not animals then it’s statistically unlikely for anyone to write about attributes and actions of animals when talking about cars. I assume the LLM is of such a scale that it permits this apparently emergent behavior.
I am skeptical about judgement calls. I would think some sensory input would be required. I guess we have to outline various types of judgement calls to really dig into this.
I am willing to accept that gpt-4 simulates the portions of the brain that deal with semantics and syntax both the receiving and transmitting abilities. And, maybe to some degree, knowledge and understanding.
I think “very similar to a complete brain” is an overstatement as the brain also does some amazing things with vision, hearing, proprioception, touch, among other things. Human brains can analyze situations and take initiative, analyze things and understand how they work and apply that to their repair, improvement, duplication, etc. We can understand and solve problems, and so on. In other words I don’t think you’re giving the brain anywhere near enough credit. We aren’t just Q&A machines.
We also have to be careful of the human tendency to anthropomorphize.
I’m curious to look into vector databases and their applications here. Addition of what amounts to memory, or like extended context, sounds extremely interesting.
Interesting to ponder what the world would be like with AGI taking over the jobs of most knowledge workers, artists, and so on. (I wonder if someone could create a CEO replacement…)
What does it mean for a capitalist society with masses of people permanently unemployed? How does the economy work when nobody can afford to buy anything because they’re unemployed? Does this create widespread poverty and collapse or a post-scarcity economy in some sectors?
Until robots mechanically evolve to Asimov’s vision, at least, manual labor is safe. Truly being able to replace a human body with a robot is still a ways off due to lack of progress on several fronts.
There is a video from CGP Grey titled Humans Need Not Apply that is extremely relevant. It was posted 9 years ago. It's a great video, I highly recommend everyone check it out.
Thanks for sharing. If you see that list of type of jobs at the end, it’s easy to see which jobs could get replaced within a reasonably short amount of time. Greed will always find a way to profit from whatever development arises. If they have 1 mountain of gold, they want 2 mountains of gold.
Yup. This is why it is vital that we all get behind Universal Basic Income.
The jobs will leave and they won’t come back. UBI is inevitable, but if we don’t get there soon enough there will be years of suffering and poverty for hundreds of millions.
I’m a senior Linux sysadmin who’s been following the evolution of AI over this past year just like you, and just like you I’ve been spending my days and nights tinkering with it non stop, and I have come to more or less the same conclusion as you have.
The downvotes are from people who haven’t used the AI, and who are still in the Internet 1.0 mindset. How people still don’t get just how revolutionary this technology is, is beyond me. But yeah, in a few years that’ll be evident enough, time will show.
And, from SirGolan ref : Submitted on 3 Oct 2023 Language Models Represent Space and Time
… (from the summary) …Our analysis demonstrates that modern LLMs acquire structured knowledge about fundamental dimensions such as space and time, supporting the view that they learn not merely superficial statistics, but literal world models. arxiv.org/abs/2310.02207
What makes it worse (in my opinion) is that LLMs are just one step in this development (which is exponential and not limited by human capabilities).
For example :
Numenta launches brain-based NuPIC to make AI processing up to 100 times more efficient lemmy.world/post/4941919
A lot of that abuse is because customer service has been gutted to the point that it is infuriating to a vast number of customers calling about what should be basic matters. Not that it’s justified, it’s just that is doesn’t necessarily have to be such a draining job if not for the greed that puts them in that situation.
There was a recent episode of Ai no Idenshi an anime regarding such topics. The customer service episode was nuts and hits on these points so well.
It’s a great show for anyone interested in fleshing some of the more mundane topics of ai out. I’ve read and watched a lot of scifi and it hit some novel stuff for me.
Doubt. These large language models can’t produce anything outside their dataset. Everything they do is derivative, pretty much by definition. Maybe they can mix and match things they were trained on but at the end of the day they are stupid text predictors, like an advanced version of the autocomplete on your phone. If the information they need to solve your problem isn’t in their dataset they can’t help, just like all those cheap Indian call centers operating off a script. It’s just a bigger script. They’ll still need people to help with outlier problems. All this does is add another layer of annoying unhelpful bullshit between a person with a problem and the person who can actually help them. Which just makes people more pissed and abusive. At best it’s an upgrade for their shit automated call systems.
Most call centers have multiple level teams where the lower ones are just reading of a script and make up the majority. You don’t have to replace every single one to implement AI. Its gonna be the same for a lot of other jobs as well and many will lose jobs.
I’d say at best it’s an upgrade to scripted customer service. A lot of the scripted ones are slower than AI and often have stronger accented people making it more difficult for the customer to understand the script entry being read back to them, leading to more frustration.
If your problem falls outside the realm of the script, I just hope it recognises the script isn’t solving the issue and redirects you to a human. Oftentimes I’ve noticed chatgpt not learning from the current conversation (if you ask it about this it will say that it does not do this). In this scenario it just regurgitates the same 3 scripts back to me when I tell it it’s wrong. In my scenario this isn’t so bad as I can just turn to a search engine but in a customer service scenario this would be extremely frustrating.
You can doubt it all you want, the fact of the matter is that AI is provably more than capable to take over the roles of humans in many work areas, and they already do.
This isn’t true, provided that their dataset is large enough. The models are stochastic, and with a large enough number of parameters and a large enough training set, can generate truly unique content. For example, I strongly doubt you’d be able to find anything remotely resembling the following anywhere, ever (look up what the movie is about, and watch it, to understand the absurdity of my request), and yet it was generated by ChatGPT:
If you read interviews from the development of these models, you’ll see the creators saying what can be clear from the above link: With a large enough training set, these models start to learn something about the organization of language itself, and how to generate novel content.
The model architecture that these things are based on tries to replicate how our brains work, and the process by which they learn language isn’t unlike how we learn language.
Your description of AI limitations sounds a lot like the human limitations of the reps we deal with every day. Sure, if some outlier situations comes up then that has to go to a human but let’s be honest - those calls are usually going to a manager anyway so I’m not seeing your argument. An escalation is an escalation. The article itself is even saying that’s not a literal 100% replacement of humans.
I’m pretty sure it’d be way nicer experience for the customers.
Lmfao, in what universe? As if trained humans reading off a script they're not allowed to deviate from isn't frustrating enough, imagine doing that with a bot that doesn't even understand what frustration is..
defacto instant reply, if trained right, way more knowledgeable that the human counterparts, no more support center loop… current experience is such a low bar.
Not with a good enough model, no. Not without some ridiculous expense, which is not what this is about.
if trained right, way more knowledgeable that the human counterparts
Support is not only a question of knowledge. Sure, for some support services, they’re basically useless. But that’s not necessarily the human fault; lack of training and lack of means of action is also a part of it. And that’s not going away by replacing the “human” part of the equation.
At best, the first few iterations will be faster at leading you off, and further down the line once you get something that’s outside the expected range of issues, it’ll either go with nonsense or just makes you circle around until you’re moved through someone actually able to do something.
Both “properly training people” and “properly training an AI model” costs money, and this is all about cutting costs, not improving user experience. You can bet we’ll see LLM better trained to politely turn people away way before they get able to handle random unexpected stuff.
Cheap as hell until you flood it with garbage, because there is a dollar amount assigned for every single interaction.
Also, I’m not confident that ChatGPT would be meaningfully better at handling the edge cases that always make people furious with phone menus these days.
at the same time we’ve had the highest immigration numbers. Canada was always immigrant country. I don’t see it as a negative thing in general. Lots of immigrants and their children are higher motivated individuals so it could be a good thing. One thing to watch out for is erosion of values in society. So just welcome newcomers and show them what does it mean to be Canadian 😃
But immigration is mostly made up of refugees who are usually pretty poor, and they come here and we have no housing for them. It’s honestly embarrassing that we welcome so many and yet they end up in shelters.
There are a few people in my family that are married with good jobs and own their own homes and they are not having children. They are focusing on other things. I am proud of them as I am proud of those in my family who have chosen to have children. This does not need to be one more point of division. It is OK to have kids and it is OK to not have kids.
Financial security should not be the biggest factor in deciding if a family wants kids, but it the modern economic system it is a very significant factor. It is hard imagining having another mouth to feed, spend liesure time with, and do parental tasks while both partners are working 50 hours a week while living paycheck to paycheck with little ability for savings to keep up with inflation or costs of living.
Cars are taking our living spaces, roads, excessive parking. Cars are ruining out health, pollution, no one walk anymore. Cars are expensive for everyone. Cars are a drain on society’s wealth and yet, we made damn sure that everyone need one.
Cars are probably one of the biggest factor, in my opinion, for a lot of problems in society.
Tax domestic speculators. It’s such an easy solution. It’s going to be painful because it’s been allowed to happen for so long. Canadians are doing this to other Canadians but no politician wants to do this to help end this gross cycle of exploitation, add in the fact provinces like Ontario that remove things like rent control and things become even further out of reach.
Because it’s political suicide. They have a Silver Tsunami coming up, and thanks to a) many companies weakening retirement plans (defined benefit? LOL), b) recessions wiping out people’s savings, there’s been a concerted shift to using home-ownership to bandage over old-age income security.
Prior to this, moderate investment and company pensions were enough to see you through, but that’s largely gone–just another part of our society that we sold off so that the rich can get more tax breaks. The cherry-on-top? We sold off LTCs to private companies, so elder-care is now a for-profit luxury.
The only way Boomers can retire is home equity. Heck, it’s the only thing fuelling our economy in general.
Of course, this is fixable: tax the rich. Pay for a society that works for everyone, not just Galen Weston or David Thompson. It would have been easier to do this back in the 1990s (before the problem really started in earnest) or before 2018 (when it got fully out of control) but it’s still possible.
Well, when your rent is 50% of your income and your food costs take up almost 30% of your income and your bills take up the remainder and you’re constantly one missed paycheck from homelessness and starvation and your family are in equally dire straits and so cannot bail you out - having children becomes entirely impossible.
You say you weren’t financially prepared, but evidently it was financially possible for you to have children. For at least half of my generation it just point blank is not possible.
Imagine wanting to have a child in times where the only way to afford a house is to never purchase a single thing with your next 4 decades worth of pay cheques from a high paying job.
Then come find out you get to finally own a single square foot of land because everyone else comes in and swoops up everywhere else or the bar rises quicker than you could ever hope to catch up with or some other dumb reason.
Oh hey! It’s literally describing my current situation.
Got engaged, got a promotion, have solid long term housing (“renting” from family)
Still can’t keep more than 1.5k in savings month over month. No way in hell in having a baby in these conditions… and i feel like I’m better off than most
Good! Maybe we can get back to sane population levels and half of these problems with the housing market and global warming will just resolve themselves. The earth’s population has more than doubled since I was born, and let me tell ya, it’s noticeable. It’s noticeable everywhere I look.
Nope, but I think it’s good that people are deciding not to have kids, especially if they can’t afford them. I think the best scenario is if people can afford kids and still decide not to have them, or only have one of them.
Costs too little, you mean. When housing and groceries are actually unaffordable, people have children to help grow food and prepare supplies for shelter. This is why birth rates are still quite high in poor countries and why birthrates fall off a cliff when people have plenty of resources readily available.
Please show me on the map where I can take my future family and farm the land on my theoretical meager wealth.
There is none.
We don’t live in a world where the average human can farm their own food meaningfully anymore. Not at scale at least. The lands been bought, built on, or industrialized for large scale crop harvest.
What you are proposing doesn’t work in most places on this planet anymore.
Lots and lots and lots of crown land that is more than suitable to provide for a family. If the people are not permitted to settle on that crown land… change that. Said land is literally owned by the people. The people can do whatever they want with it.
Only the super high productive land is used for large scale crops. You do not need anything of the sort to feed a family. You’re not becoming a farmer here. Farmers don’t need children. They have tractors.
Well, you’re not becoming a modern farmer. You’re becoming a preindustrial farmer. Modern life has its problems but I’d rather not become a peasant, thanks.
Growing food doesn’t make you a farmer. A farmer, by definition, is an owner of a farm business. In Canada, we take it further and require the business has at least $7,000 in gross farm sales to legally consider its owner a farmer.
So, let’s say you want to make it a business. Who will be your customers? You are definitely not going to be able to produce the food more cheaply than large scale agriculture working Canada’s most prime land. What’s your value proposition?
Let’s be realistic: You’re not becoming a farmer. You are growing food for yourself in this scenario because your time is otherwise worthless. If your time was not worthless, you would use that time to generate value and use that value to buy food from a farmer.
Modern life has its problems but I’d rather not become a peasant, thanks.
I don’t follow. Because food and shelter is still quite affordable (even if not nearly as cheap as you wish it were) and with both starting to fall in price you think you’re going to become a peasant? You may want to clarify.
The way I see it, a farmer is one who operates a farm, and a farm is an area dedicated to the production of food or other plant or animal products, but that’s irrelevant. We can use the word “homesteader” if you prefer.
Life as a homesteader sucks. It’s very hard work with long hours. If you get a few bad crop years in a row, you starve. If you become disabled, you starve. If you become seriously ill, far away from decent medical care, you die. Of course the community can help you, but you’re surrounded by other homesteaders with the same problems.
That is, more or less, the way it was for most of human history. These days, we specialize. We assign a few people to produce food, a few people to educate the young, a few people to treat illness, and so on. In most of the Western world, we organize this with money. If I opt out of the system to become a homesteader and work the land for food for my family, that is my full-time job. I don’t contribute anything extra to society, and so I have no (or little) money. My life becomes essentially that of a peasant. Oh, sure, I have vaccines and civil rights and maybe running water, so my life isn’t as bad as that of a medieval peasant, but it’s still fundamentally similar: I give up most of the advantages of living in a modern, industrialized society.
You make it sound like we are talking about actively choosing to become a homesteader.
If you read the thread (a lot to ask, I know) you would know that we are talking about one ending up as a homesteader because they have failed to provide value to society. If one was providing value to society then one could easily afford to live in modern society, including having their food produced by a farmer.
If you did read the thread then you are not making yourself clear. Why would someone purposely stop providing value to society?
I would love to pump some baby batter into my gf and start having a kids, can’t do that while we’re stuck living paycheque to paycheque on a combined 130k in my parents basement.
How bad is housing in Canada right now? This is not a prominent topic here in Europe, so let’s say you look for a 200 m² house in the outer parts of a bigger city, what would be the price for that?
I bought a townhouse that was 1700sqft (~150m^2) in Markharm, a suburb of the GTA (1hr to the center of toronto by car, 1.5hrs by bus), in a pretty bad area for 800K CAD during a slight market crash during covid. By all accounts this was an exceptionally good deal, by realtor didn’t think we could get anything for under 900. I sold that townhouse for 1.1 mil in 2023.
The issue is that investors are buying houses 100k over asking price same or next day because they don’t plan on living in them, they just want to make the investment and prop up the housing market bubble for as long as they can.
That can’t possibly be true. Just using simple logic: if someone owns a vacant house or unit, why wouldn’t they rent it out considering the absurd rents that can be charged in this market?
That’s a US statistic. Their housing market is very different from Canada’s.
It’s clearly referring to seasonal residences, many of which are properties that aren’t suitable for year round use. My uncle owns a cabin up north that is only accessible by sled in the winter. Should that really be considered an “empty house”? It’s a huge red herring to measure every single building someone can sleep in as housing, rather than measure the buildings people are actually treating as housing.
It isn’t “4 empty homes for every person”. That’s a crazy number. It says some counties (again in the US) (specifically rural counties) have more seasonal vacant residences than non-seasonal. Which makes total sense. The county where my uncle’s cabin is located doesn’t have any major towns in it. It’s just cottage country.
None of that has anything to do with the housing crisis.
Start with income perspective. The average annual salary in 2022 was just under $60,000. Nationally, the average house price in summer 2023 was a bit over $750,000. These incomes and house prices are affected pretty strongly by the lower incomes and lower housing costs in rural Canada vs the major cities like Vancouver and Toronto
So… shift attention to the cities. In Toronto and Vancouver, the average house price is around $1,200,000 give or take a little. You need at a combined income of least $280,000 to qualify for a house like that (or have substantial equity built up in previous home purchases). Most people are earning at or close to the national average… with a few - especially those in STEM careers (sw devs for example) up over $100,000 per year.
I live in a suburb city (I own my house)… it’s inconveniently located if you want/need to be in the core city centre for work (I’m about 3 hours commute right now if I needed to go in to a downtown office… thankfully I don’t). Houses on my street are relatively new (most built in 2019 and 2020). The houses currently for sale are listing between $1,250,000 and $2,350,000.
Thanks for the insight, this is crazy. We are looking for houses right now here in Germany, and and the last one we visited was 269 m² for around 500.000€ and 30 minutes drive away of the inner city of the next major city. I hope politics does something about your problem, it can not stay like this.
Germany has its own insanity in the housing market :-P I lived in Germany or several years. I rented vs buying and I dreaded moving because facing that shit show of a rental process (at least in places like Hamburg) was… too much. Queuing up with 100 other people all racing to fill in the rental application form first just so they’d get a chance at a place. I quickly learned to use an agency to line up rentals… and ended up renting a VERY nice newly built flat for the same price as the old many-times-renovated flats in the same district.
I did buy a house elsewhere in Europe and it was… interesting as an expat. It was substantially cheaper than Canada… granted it was many years ago, so not a fair comparison.
The Canadian government makes noises about “fixing” the housing crisis in Canada, but… I honestly don’t think they can. Houses are currently priced out of reach… WAY out of reach for the average new home buyer. People can’t save up a 5% to 20% down payment fast enough to keep up with the rising cost of living. The cost of everything is increasing at multiple times their potential salary increases (if they even get any).
Without writing out my whole life story: student loans, unexpected vehicle issues (public transit isn’t an option where I live), out of pocket medical costs not covered by benefits or gov’t, long commutes with expensive gas and no feasible alternatives and few job opportunities closer to home in my field. Can’t afford to move due to high rents so I’m stuck driving.
There’s more but I’m hungry and wanna eat dinner and don’t feel like going into it. We save everything that isn’t essential and barely go out for fun, anything extra goes towards a down payment but the way things are going right not it doesn’t look like we’ll be able to buy for years unless we can put away like 2k a month.
I don’t know what province youre in but also the skyrocketing cost of food and groceries.
What I got a couple years ago with $100 doesn’t buy shit now a days.
Fuck our government both federal and provincial, and all parties. Fuck every politician that sits in parliament collecting a pretty 6 figure paycheque and watching their real-estate asset appreciate as Canadians get perpetually fucked over time and time again.
My partner got food poisoning a few years ago and kicked her food intolerances up a level where even trace amounts now wreck her so we’ve had to go to the dairy free route which is expensive and very limiting. Her doctor recently told her to try cutting gluten so now I have to relearn how to shop and cook to accommodate that which adds more to the bill. She’s essentially a gluten free vegan who eats meat.
When people say pay cheque to pay cheque in this type of situation they’re still putting money away into savings typically but are out of reach of where they need to be. There’s usually large debts, medical costs or other financial burdens that aren’t mentioned like maybe taking care of a family member. Their pay cheque to pay cheque situation is a bit different than someone working minimum wage and will be out on the streets as they still have money going into some sort of savings
She does have an iud so I could before, but her Dr put her on medication for her rheumatoid arthritis last year that causes birth defects so at the moment we gotta double up. Even if that wasn’t the case, still couldn’t afford to have a kid right now.
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